Tuesday, March 6, 2012

For a brief period on March
1st—the National Day of Action for Education—students, faculty, and
concerned members of the community gathered in front of governor Tom Corbett’s
Philadelphia office. Corbett, as anyone there could tell you, has proposed massive
budget cuts to state-assisted Pennsylvania schools. And so, before heading on to the Philly
school district headquarters to protest budget cuts there, we briefly gathered
outside of his office, yelling out, “Hey, Corbett, where are you? / We just
want to meet with you.” The chant conveyed more than it intended. We didn’t
actually expect that Corbett would appear. But, as our brief demonstration
began, we were entirely unsure that we were in the proper place, a place where
Corbett—should he have so desired—could have staged an appearance. Occupy Penn
had arrived a little early, our numbers were smallish (about 100, including
some Fight for Philly people who also arrived early), and we worried that we
looked utterly ridiculous. Were we even in
front of Corbett’s office? Over a dozen people asked me that alone.

Let me explain. Philadelphia is not the capital of Pennsylvania; Harrisburg
is. Corbett’s office in Philly is a rather informal affair, not located in any
state building identifiable by marble columns, guided tours, or obvious guards.
The semiotics of sovereignty are missing. When one gathers around 200 South
Broad Street to protest Corbett, it looks, to the casual passerby, as if one is
in fact gathering around Palm, a steakhouse located in the same building. The
only feature identifying the building as housing Corbett is a Pennsylvania
state flag flying outside—or at least that’s the slim signifier I could hang my
hat on as I assured others that, yes, Corbett’s office is here, right there,
even if he’s not in it, even if it’s not apparent that he would be in it.

Let’s abstract. We were on a
march protesting the state’s refusal to occupy a position of responsibility vis-à-vis
its young citizens. But it was unclear to us where the state actually resided. Our
problem, then, was not simply that the state has abdicated a role of
responsibility in fostering the education of its citizens; it consisted in the
fact that the space of appeal, the political space articulating sovereign to
subject, did not seem to exist. And so we had to assure ourselves that we were
not merely yelling at busboys in a steakhouse by undertaking particular hermeneutic
labors: Look, there’s the flag; look, cops are blocking the doors; the governor
must be inside, or must have been inside at some point. In so doing, we were
temporarily able to reconstitute the space in front of 200 South Broad Street
as a political space, a space of appeal, a site that the sovereign could have
occupied to hear our demands.

We can derive a lesson from
this experience in the operation of neoliberal sovereignty. Neoliberalism does
not only dissolve the ties binding sovereign to subject by unbundling
privileges and protections from formal citizenship; it also dissolves the political
space in which that unbundling could be contested. The sovereign does not only
hide; it also dissolves the space in which its hiddenness would appear as
absence. Citizens thus need to produce the space in which this absence, as
absence, is apparent, and this spatiality is produced by recasting the
socio-political field through a hermeneutic search for sovereignty. If one does
not look in a particular way, the very absence of the sovereign will not be
remarkable and will remain illegible—one will simply be shouting outside of a
steakhouse. The very possibility of noting the absence of the sovereign thus
depends on a kind of anamorphosis, a reading of the social from a particular
vantage such that the absence of that sovereign becomes legible as a constitutive
feature of the social. For us, the slim sign of the flying PA state flag
provided and authorized that anamorphotic perspective.

Any relation of sovereignty requires
imaginative and interpretive labors for its (re)production, and such labors are
likely, in some fashion, to be anamorphotic. The questions we need to ask ourselves
are: What organizes our interpretive labors? What social-political field do we
hope to create through the activity of thought? As we looked for Corbett, as we
attempted producing an imaginative zone in which Corbett might appear (and thus
where his non-appearance would be remarkable), with what thought of sovereignty
were we preoccupied, and thus re-inscribing? I want to suggest that the content
of our actions—petitioning, demanding via a claim about obligations—as well as the
scene of the event’s staging—in front of a big tall tower, containing and
concealing a sovereign we couldn’t see—reinscribed a well-nigh Hobbesian
construction of the socio-political field. By hook or by crook, we were going
to find a transcendent power, even if a ridiculous flag provided the only proof
of its presence. We imagined, in effect, this:

Note how the individual
bodies in Hobbes’ artificial man cannot, in effect, see the social field that
they’ve produced; they’ve relieved themselves of the imaginative labors of
thinking the space of sovereignty. Note also, however, that they occupy the
field of the sovereign, its body, even if they do not know it, even if they
cannot see it. We can take from this image a warning: as we construct our
spaces of sovereignty, we need to do it in such a way that this space is always
in view, such that its artifactuality, its constructed and labored nature,
cannot be hidden from the collectivity that, in gathering together, in
embodying itself, constructed it. What if, on 200 South Broad Street, we didn’t
look up, we didn’t search for the slim signs of an absent sovereign, we didn’t
reinscribe the verticality of power?

What if we sought
sovereignty by looking across, at one another?

To Hobbes’ frontispiece I
want to oppose a slightly less famous meditation on sovereignty. You can find
it in Philadelphia, right outside of Fergie’s Pub (to which all should go for Ulysses trivia night just before
Bloomsday).

The sword and scepter of
Hobbes’ frontispiece are replaced with a bottle of beer and a teacup. More
important is the exteriorization of the little bodies composing Hobbes’
artificial man: they are (for the most part) outside this sovereign suds-slinger.
Indeed, the legibility of the body as a body is almost dependent on the bodies
outside of it—as if, through these bodies’ aggregation, they produced the
outline of a sovereign body that, for all that, is not filled with or peopled
by its subjects. Sovereignty here is an empty space produced through
collectivization that, in its emptiness, permits that collectivity to gaze
across at one another, to see the other sovereign bodies who produce this empty
space of sovereign articulation through
the practice of articulation. Sovereignty here is simply another name for the
spacing of horizontal, immanent sociality—the articulated non-coherence of a
social collective whose substance consists in nothing more than its coming-to-co-presence.

When we occupy this
perspective, the question of locating the state—sovereign or steakhouse?—becomes
less acute. Because sovereignty isn’t a thing or a sign or a body; it’s a space
of articulation produced by the praxis of articulation, of being-with. Once the
Temple marchers appeared at 200 South Broad Street, the hundred or so of us who
were already there, we who pondered if we in fact stood in front of Corbett’s
office, stopped caring. We rushed to the hundreds who came, comrades, and
hugged and danced.